Year ’s Eve – Every year, on New Year’s Eve, a revelry results in a number of road accidents across India. Some of these result in fatalities. John Donne wrote, “Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.
” His words remind us that every death carries a weight greater than its statistics. Yet, when a family loses someone in a road accident, the language of justice turns into the language of arithmetic.
The Motor Accident Claims Tribunal multiplies income by an age-based factor, adds modest sums for love, care, and funeral expenses, and announces the result as ‘just compensation’. What begins as a legal exercise often ends as a moral puzzle.
A doctor and a homemaker may lose their lives in the same accident, yet the law values their absence differently. The doctor’s family receives several lakhs of rupees more than the vendor’s, and the homemaker’s loss is often measured in token figures. The problem lies not in the intent of the law but in its method.
A welfare statute that was meant to bring relief has quietly absorbed the habits of the marketplace, where worth is measured by earning, not by being. The arithmetic of loss Section 168 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, empowers tribunals to award compensation that “appears to be just.
” To bring consistency, the Supreme Court in Sarla Verma v. DTC and later in National Insurance Co. v.
Pranay Sethi introduced the multiplier method. The formula multiplies a victim’s annual income by an age-based factor and adds fixed sums under standard categories such as loss of consortium, loss of estate, and funeral costs. The goal was fairness through uniformity.
In practice, uniformity has produced hierarchy. When a victim has no formal income, tribunals assign a “notional income,” often a symbolic amount detached from real contribution. Children, homemakers, and informal workers are thus treated as marginal lives in the eyes of arithmetic.
The Supreme Court, in Kirti v. Oriental Insurance, recognised unpaid domestic work as genuine labour and sought to correct the imbalance, but the structure remains tethered to income. In a system that counts only what can be measured, those who build, teach, care, and nurture are often valued least.
Article 14 of the Constitution promises equality before the law, yet a system that compensates the salaried more generously than the self-employed or the unwaged risks violating that promise. Equality cannot depend on economic visibility.
Article 21, which protects the right to life with dignity, faces a similar tension. Dignity is intrinsic, not conditional. When compensation fluctuates with income, dignity becomes a privilege rather than a principle.
The mason who built the city and the child who never drew a salary deserve recognition beyond their wage potential. The contrast with other modes of transport is revealing. Under the Railways Act, 1989, the death of any passenger attracts a fixed sum of ₹8 lakh.
Under the Carriage by Air Act, 1972, airlines pay a uniform amount for every deceased passenger. On the road, however, the law insists on knowing one’s income before assigning value to one’s life. Even the notion of unlimited liability offers little comfort.
Section 147 of the Motor Vehicles Act requires insurers to cover “the amount of liability incurred” for death or bodily injury. There is no statutory ceiling. In theory, the liability is unlimited.
In reality, it remains bounded by income. The absence of a cap matters little when the base figure is drawn from an unequal scale. The difficulty is not only procedural but philosophical.
The American philosopher, Lon Fuller, described the inner morality of law as its duty to be coherent and fair. A formula that equates life with livelihood cannot satisfy either.
The American legal philosopher and jurist, Ronald Dworkin, envisioned law as integrity, a system that treats every person with equal concern and respect. When tribunals attach greater value to some lives over others, they move from integrity to inequity. For the American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, dignity lies in capability — the real freedom to live, love, and flourish.
Income may enlarge these freedoms, but it cannot define them. The law, by tying worth to wages, narrows the meaning of both justice and life. Towards a fairer formula A fairer design must begin with a universal baseline.
Every life should attract a fixed “dignity floor,” an amount payable in every case of fatality or grievous injury, irrespective of income. Beyond that, income-linked additions can address actual financial loss, preserving fairness without eroding equality. The law should also carve out a separate category of “dignity damages” to recognise grief, companionship, and emotional harm.
These amounts must evolve with inflation and social conditions. Equally important is the need for process reform.
The Delhi High Court’s Motor Accident Claims Annuity Deposit model, which integrates police, hospitals, and banks, shows that technology can deliver compensation swiftly and transparently. Defenders of the current model often argue that compensation must restore dependents to their previous standard of living and that income is a neutral measure of loss.
This reasoning fits private contracts better than public welfare. The goal of social law is not to mirror the market but to correct its distortions. A universal floor can guarantee recognition for all, while proportional increments can accommodate differences.
In this balance between equality and equity lies the true meaning of ‘just compensation. ’ Shubham Kumar, academic, lawyer and public policy consultant.